The bare facts

Ben Schott used to send hand-made booklets of random trivia to his friends at Christmas. Now Schott's Original Miscellany, a compilation of those useless snippets, is flying off the shelves. Stuart Jeffries on this year's bestselling stocking filler

Schott's Original Miscellany is a 160-page, 37,837-word book printed on 80gsm vol 20 Crofton Bookwove paper. The body type is Adobe Garamond, which was drawn by Robert Slimbach, issued in 1989 and based on the original designs and matrices of the legendary French printer Claude Garamond (c 1450-1561).

It was written by a 29-year-old photographer called Ben Schott, who is a politics graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and currently lives in Highgate High Street, London N6. Some of his photographic work can be seen at www.schott-media.com. He did much of the research for the book in the British Library's Humanities 2 reading-room, where he may well have irritated other readers by giggling repeatedly at what he found there. Especially, one suspects, some of the more obscure emoticons, such as :( ), which means bigmouth, *<:-), which means Santa, and :-)8, which means wearing a bow tie.

The idea for the book came from home-made Christmas cards that Schott sent to friends. They were no ordinary cards, but consisted of little booklets containing all of the essential information he supposed that one needed to get through life, but could never find.

The book was published by Bloomsbury on November 4. On Tuesday evening, its amazon.co.uk sales ranking was 119. On Wednesday evening it was 42; and at time of going to press, it was 29. Its popularity is all the more remarkable since the book has so far had next to no press publicity. (Amazon customers who bought the book also bought Magnus Magnusson's The Family Quiz Book and Giles Emerson's Sin City: London in Pursuit of Pleasure.)

According to Stephen Fry, who supplied a quote that is printed in a red sash around the book, it is "the best ever collection of essential trivia. Everyone ought to get one for Christmas." And the way sales are rocketing, everyone will get one for Christmas, not least because it is a small volume that could easily be placed by Santa or a Santa impersonator into an American tan stocking, even a size eight and a half. (This is a very a small stocking, fitting a woman who wears a size three shoe - which is equivalent to US size five, or European 35.5).

But why is Schott's Original Miscellany making a splash just now? After all, it was published more than a month ago. One reason is that it is only now that the Christmas sales of books - which account for 40% of annual sales - are beginning in earnest. Another connected reason is that word of mouth is now kicking in as Christmas punters learn about the book and, rather than dismissing it as a cynical seasonal commodity, recognise it as the solution to all their present-buying anxieties. "I heard about it from a friend. I'm buying two," said one man at a Borders bookshop in Islington yesterday. "One for my uncle and one for me. Mind you, I'm a bit worried that somebody else might get it for me, so maybe I'll give my copy to someone else as a present."

"I started sending out press releases in October," says Colin Midson at the book's publishers, Bloomsbury, "but it was really hard to convey why it is so special before they actually saw it. To say it's a book of trivia doesn't really explain it. I think it's taking off now because people have seen the book and are charmed by it. Sales have doubled each week since release." It is already in its fourth reprint.

But it's hard not to be suspicious of the book as all-purpose present solver and cultural signifier. Isn't Schott's Original Miscellany just a slab of data cast into an already information-overloaded world? Do we really need to know who supplies bagpipes to the Queen? Or whose portraits are printed on American banknotes of various denominations? Stop saying yes. Or that, in all the countries where one drives on the left (such as Kenya, Japan, India, Zambia and the UK), there is only one exception to the rule, namely Savoy Street, off Strand in London, where traffic has to drive on the right? And why do we need to know that the correct usage in the previous sentence is, according to Schott, "Strand" rather than "the Strand"?

Aren't our celebrity-addled heads stuffed with enough rubbish already? Isn't this book the latest mutation of trivial pursuits, another boon to those fools who want to measure their lives out in coffee spoons rather than learning anything important? Isn't attention-deficit disorder already commonplace enough, and won't Schott's nuggets of fun just add to it?

"I wrote it at random and that's the way it should be read," said Schott recently. And that is one of the pleasures of the book. As when browsing a dictionary, an encyclopaedia or a thesaurus, one finds oneself reading one entry and being diverted by the one next to it, and the one next to that, until an hour has passed and you can't remember why you picked the thing up in the first place.

But is that any way to carry on? Shouldn't we be savouring the labyrinthine subclauses of, say, Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust rather than diverting ourselves momentarily with the details of hunting seasons? (Incidentally, you really want to get those grouse, ptarmigan and black game shot fast, since the season for each, Schott tells us, ends on Tuesday.)

Perhaps not. Indeed, Schott quotes Woolf at the start of the book: "Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than what is commonly thought small." Let's get trivial with a clear conscience.

Schott is not happy with this terminology. In a recent online interview, he said: "It's not a book of trivia. There is trivia in it. It's things that interest me, bits of knowledge that are out there that nobody knows about." This, clearly, is wrong: there are no bits of knowledge nobody knows about. But still. The things that interest Schott include commonly misspelled words (such as auxiliary, diarrhoea or, vexingly, misspelled), commonly used Yiddish words (such as "Oi, gevald!", an expression of torment), a schematic map so that he and we can understand The Shipping Forecast, and a meticulous analysis of washing symbols. "When I was researching washing symbols, I picked up a shirt I was wearing," said Schott. "I had been washing it for three years and it was dry-clean only."

His research methodology for the book was hardly scholarly. "Because Schott's Original makes very few claims to be exhaustive, authoritative, or even practical it was the ideal book to research. If, after a long search through the stacks of the British Library, accurate and interesting information on a subject could not be found, the subject was unceremoniously abandoned. And, if an entry looked like it might get out of hand, it was pared down to its most salient and amusing facts. By this method, for example, the entire history of Burma was reduced to the curious deaths of some of its more unlikely monarchs."

Schott has an agreement with Bloomsbury to produce a series of these books of miscellany. The second will be Schott's Original Food and Drink Miscellany, in which the author plans to include useful tips on how to sharpen carving knives, varieties and potencies of laxatives, as well as the cultural history of absinthe. There are also plans for a Schott's Sports Miscellany.

Schott has hit the list motherlode, as others have done before him. We love lists and that is why books such as Michael Cader's The Ultimate Book of Lists: People, Places and Things, Everyman's Fact Finder and no doubt many others besides thrive. Is this listmania a guy thing? That, at least, has been a common supposition since 1995 when Nick Hornby's High Fidelity was published. In this, the hero made top fives (eg Elvis Costello songs and episodes of Cheers) and the suspicion was that blokes make lists as displacement activity to sublimate their feelings, instead of developing emotional literacy. Isn't this why men like Hunter Davies published a Book of Lists and why talk show host David Letterman made a book of top 10 lists, and now why Schott is selling books by the shedload?

Probably not entirely, on two counts. One the book isn't just a compendium of lists. It is a mixture of encyclopaedia, dictionary, almanac, lexicon, treasury, commonplace, amphigouri and vade-mecum and some other things too. Like all of these, it has its useful aspects, but its chief pleasure is for browsing. Secondly, women too like books of this kind, filled with diverting tips and winningly fatuous lists.

Schott writes that his current book "makes few claims to be exhaustive, authoritative, or even practical. It does, however, claim to be essential." But that is clearly nonsense - his book is, essentially, inessential. Nobody needs to know, for example, that the quantity of beauty required to launch a single ship is one Milli-Helen - but it is, none the less, a nice thing to learn.

Odds and Ends: excerpts from Schott's book

Iceberg sizes: A growler is an iceberg between one and 5 metres above water; a bergy bit, 1-4; small, 5-15; medium, 16-45; large, 46-75; very large, over 75.

Nouns of assemblage: A malpertness of pedlars, a murmuration of starlings, an exaltation of larks, a murder of crows, a glozing of taverners.

Arabic words: Almost all these words are derived from Arabic. The admiral in the alcove, while sitting on his sequin sofa dreaming of harems, should fear the assassin rather than seeking solace in the alchemy of alcohol.

Unusual deaths of Burmese kings: In 1599, Nandabayin laughed himself to death when informed by a visiting Italian merchant that Venice was a free state without a king.